Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [19]
‘It shouldn’t,’ said Gregorio. It was a silly remark, and he wasn’t surprised when Nicholas didn’t trouble to answer. At the same time, he wondered if Nicholas realised that they, too, would have time on their hands. Their business wouldn’t take long, and they wouldn’t be encouraged to linger. He couldn’t imagine Nicholas strolling among the parks and gardens and vineyards. He caught himself wondering if he should ask about brothels. Nicholas, to his Bank, was an enigma as well as a responsibility.
They left their escort by the canal, outside the arcaded ground floor of the handsome brick house they were to visit. Only the wall that stretched on either side indicated the amount of ground which, sprawling behind, contained the wide yards, the warehouses, the wells, the furnace areas, the painting-sheds, the tool-making offices, the towers of broken glass and the towers of sand and the sacks and sacks of soda ash that comprised the multiple operations of the finest glasshouse in the world.
Then its owner came to the entrance to meet them, and took a dislike to Nicholas on the spot.
Marietta Barovier was late-born but not all that young: her father had died four years previously after forty years at the top of his profession. Yet her hair under its grimy cloth was thick and black, and her olive skin slick as chamois with perpetual sweat. Her eyes, large and heavy-lidded, were piercingly dark, and her body sturdy and short in a stained canvas smock that hung calf-length. Below that, she wore thonged leather shoes grey with scorching. She said, ‘This is not the head of your Bank?’
Nicholas considered her. ‘Signor Gregorio tells me what to do,’ he said. He waited, and gave a brief smile. ‘In fact, madonna, he and I are partners. But he has had the privilege, which I have not, of seeing your glasshouse.’
‘You would like to see it?’ she said. ‘Then come this way.’ She frowned at Gregorio, and he recognised, with a start, that she was displeased to a degree that might lose them the contract. She said, ‘You may leave your servant here.’
Nicholas produced his lethal dimples again. ‘He is not my servant,’ he said, ‘he is my factor. His name is Lopez. I should like him to come.’
‘Very well,’ said Marietta Barovier, and striding through the house, led the way into open air, and towards the shimmering heat within which lay the ribbed beehive shapes of the kilns.
Gregorio had seen it before: the scarred, glistening bodies, clothed from the waist in stained drawers; the frieze of spidery tools; the long metal rods with their glowing tips; the bloody glare of the kiln-vents, within which the mounded shapes of the glass stood insubstantial in the extreme light. And, like dancers, musicians, the maestri with their tongs, tweaking, shaping and rolling the yard-long rods with their drooping vermilion phalli; or seated on stools, the slender tube caressed between palms. They made soundless music, playing the rod like a pipe while the glimmering end-jewel inflated, paused, and inflated to become, cooling, a weightless circle of nothing.
A man, hastening from the furnace, brought a molten lump that, swung, became a rope of sugar, a handle. A rod whirled in a glistening arc until the globe at its end lengthened into a neck. The men worked in near-silence, their arms powerful as those of a bowman, or a man used to a sword, or a stave. But they were handling glass.
Gregorio turned to look at the founder of the Banco di Niccolò and then remained looking, surprised, for Nicholas stood as if mesmerised. He moved slowly, when called. He followed mutely as Marietta Barovier led them impatiently through the rest of the process and back through the storerooms to the house. There, among the finished pieces, he wakened, and peered at the shelves.
Gregorio watched. The woman stood by the door, her hands on her hips, her lips pursed. Rambling round the brilliant display, Nicholas examined the bottles and tumblers, the jugs and the cups and the beakers, the hanging lamps and the phials, stopping